Profiles of Inference
Of three oral histories in my possession, two are full-blown — by people who write them for a living — and one assembles interviews conducted by the subject’s friends. Writing “my past and thoughts,” as Alexander Herzen put it, makes an oral history feel superfluous. But the presence of interlocutors may prompt thoughts that might not surface in self-reflection. It’s also more spontaneous than a written text. For real spontaneity, though, consider the profiles we create inadvertently as our online transactions are tracked as data points and analyzed.
Amazon provides a version of this when it offers us related goods, sometimes prompted by an immediate purchase, but also gathered as “things you might like.” Ads washing up on social media are franker, I think, in responding to the edge conditions of web forays. But they may also be calculated bets that our demographic might bite for someone/something like this.
It’s possible, I read, to obtain these profiles. They’re reminiscent of personality tests that paint a portrait in mannerisms, all the tics that surface as we encounter other humans. INFJs crave society and then, quickly drained by it, rush off precipitously in order to recover. The enneagram’s character types similarly touch on live wires of self-recognition: how charm wards off pain, for example, and how gluttony is the worst sin because it permits all the others.
Ubiquitous monitoring, which the CCP imposes on China, constructs profiles based on tracked data and then uses them for social control by turning privileges on or off. We do the same, of course, but limit the data. It’s still possible here to avoid being tracked, but you have to work at it and a lack of certain data can be held against you by financial institutions. What’s oppressive in both cases is the algorithmic certainty of their cause and effect.
“Nothing is hidden,” Dōgen Eihei remarked. It seems true — every last thing will surface in time, so it’s tempting to reveal it yourself. The liberating move of living openly is better than late-in-life confessions, but both can still make you look silly. The real question is if anyone will care. The Stasi investigator in The Lives of Others was focused on figures of cultural importance, even celebrity; ordinary people were left to their neighbors to denounce. The CCP now has block wardens on a mass scale, but the sheer numbers involved, even with AI doing the sorting, means triage. And workarounds emerge, of course, when the algorithm shuts people off from something like a train ticket. For a price, scalpers stand ready to help.
If I write openly about the ambiguities of my life, it’s to lend support to the idea of nuance. We’re presented with a binary world, but some realize early on that this is a hoax, and the people who see things this way are deluded. I write to make sense of a life that never entirely makes sense, and will probably never align with how convention wants to construct it. One of life’s dilemmas is that we have to live with these conventions, even if they’re shams. If we mostly live as privately as possible, it’s to put some distance from our lives and them. Yet this may be an era when it’s better to go public with our nonconformance so we can quickly find our cohort and our cohort’s cohort, parading our idiosyncrasies in a spirit of solidarity.
